Excerpt:"After Women and Human Development and Frontiers of Justice, two books in which she has been developing the capabilities approach as a partial theory of justice, Martha Nussbaum has now written a third book on her capabilities approach. Yet Creating Capabilities is in one sense very different from the earlier two books, since it aims to be an accessible introduction to the capabilities approach that is aiming at undergraduates and general readers. This is not an easy task, given the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of the capabilities approach. Admirably, Creating Capabilities delivers what it sets out to do and serves very well as a first theoretical introduction to the capabilities approach."

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Abstract"This paper sets out the central features of John Rawls's political philosophy paying special attention to its relationship to his early work in moral epistemology. It will appear as the entry on Rawls in the "Encyclopedia of Ethics" forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell."

Friday, September 09, 2011

"This book has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment — more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. His so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. I believe it is time to redeem Theory’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism, a promise that went unredeemed in Rawls's lifetime but on which this book attempts to deliver. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory — a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed."

Part 2: Reconstructing Rawls2. The Kantian Conception of the Person3. The Priorities of Right and Political Liberty4. The Priority of Civil Liberty5. The Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity6. The Difference Principle

Part 3: Kantian Foundations7. Justifying the Kantian Conception of the Person8. The Poverty of Political Liberalism

Conclusion: Justice as Fairness as a Universalistic Kantian Liberalism

Robert S. Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis.

Tuesday, September 06, 2011

What is the primary value of democracy? When should we make decisions democratically and when should we rely on markets? And when should we accept the decisions of unelected officials, such as judges or bureaucrats? Knight and Johnson explore how a commitment to pragmatism should affect our answers to such important questions. They conclude that democracy is a good way of determining how these kinds of decisions should be made--even if what the democratic process determines is that not all decisions should be made democratically. So, for example, the democratically elected U.S. Congress may legitimately remove monetary policy from democratic decision-making by putting it under the control of the Federal Reserve.

Knight and Johnson argue that pragmatism offers an original and compelling justification of democracy in terms of the unique contributions democratic institutions can make to processes of institutional choice. This focus highlights the important role that democracy plays, not in achieving consensus or commonality, but rather in addressing conflicts. Indeed, Knight and Johnson suggest that democratic politics is perhaps best seen less as a way of reaching consensus or agreement than as a way of structuring the terms of persistent disagreement.

1. Preliminaries [pdf]2. Pragmatism and the Problem of Institutional Design [pdf]3. The Appeal of Decentralization4. The Priority of Democracy and the Burden of Justification5. Reconsidering the Role of Political Argument in Democratic Politics6. Refining Reflexivity7. Formal Conditions: Institutionalizing Liberal Guarantees8. Substantive Conditions: Pragmatism and Effectiveness9. Conclusion

Jack Knight is Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. James Johnson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.

Monday, September 05, 2011

"How to Be Good"
Excerpts:"Around the mid-nineties, Parfit started reading Kant. He hadn't read him seriuosly before because he had always found him irritating - his appalling sentences (it was Kant, he felt, who had made really bad writing philosophically acceptable), his grandiloquence, his infuriating inconsistencies and glaring mistakes. He felt that the crucial Kantian idea of autonomy, for instance, was just a blatant cheat: Kant wanted there to be a universally valid moral law, and he wanted every person to have the moral autonomy to determine the law for himself, and he just couldn't have both those things at once. "I asked a Kantian, "Does this mean that, if I don't give myself Kant's Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?" "No", I was told, "you have to give yourself a law, and there's only one law". This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called People's Democracies of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said" "But I haven't given myself Kant's Imperative as a law". I was told "Yes, you have."The thing that mattered enormously to Kant - moral autonomy, motive - didn't seem that important to Parfit. He thought that individual selves were less significant than other people thought they were, so he wasn't that interested in motive; he thought that moral truths existed independently of human will, so he wasn't going to place much value on autonomy in Kant's sense [....] Parfit's first love in moral philosophy was someone completely unlike Kant - Henry Sidgwick.... [....]As he read deeper and deeper into Kant, he began to feel that the grandiloquence and inconsistency that had irritated him in the past were the product of an emotional nature so passionately extreme that it was simply incapable of Sidgwick's careful self-criticism. For Kant, something was never just good, it was necessary; there was little "most" or "some" in Kant, only "all" or "none". Parfit recognized that he, too, was an emotional extremist who found it difficult to accept answers that fell between everything and nothing. [....] He came to believe that Kant was the greatest moral philosopher since the ancient Greeks..."

Saturday, September 03, 2011

Daniel Little's post is based on letters between John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs in 1998. The letters were published in "Revue de philosophie économique/Review of Economic Philosophy" (vol. 7, 2003): "Three letters on The Law of Peoples and the European Union". See the letters here [pdf].